Theden was first launched one year ago yesterday. A lot has happened in that year: we’ve developed a perspective not quite like any other source of news or opinion, and we’ve made new friends and sparked great discussions in the process. Given that we’ve come so far, it’s time for us to reiterate—and build upon—our initial purpose, our first principles, our basic premise.
Theden starts with the idea of thedes. A thede is an ingroup, an identity that associates you with other people. People like to show that they’re members of thedes: they speak a certain dialect, which reflects where they’re from (or perhaps the culture they’ve adopted later in life); they drive a certain car (a man in a Bentley and a man in a pickup truck are thedishly distinct at first glance; they don’t hang out with the same crowd); they wear a certain T-shirt to let you know they’re a fan of some band; and so on. People also like to show which thedes they’re not members of, or more precisely, which ones their own thede rejects as elthedish: they make fun of other dialects; they mock and reject elthedish music (listen to any metal fan talk about Justin Bieber); they pick fights with elthedes; et cetera.
But the West has a thede problem. Ask anyone outside the West, and especially outside the developed world in general, who his thedes are, which ingroups he most strongly aligns himself with, and he’ll tell you: his family, his faith, his ethnic group. Ask a typical Westerner, and he’ll tell you about his job, his political party, his school, his favorite bands, perhaps his hometown—but caring deeply about your family and heritage is seen as a bit passé. In the West, we’ve been bowling alone, eating alone, living alone—we have a degree of atomization that we seem to take for granted, yet it is entirely abnormal not only by non-Western standards, but by Western standards at any time before the Second World War. Our thedes have been made weak, shallow, even self-opposing.
And what about the people who run the West—not just our elected officials or even our mass media, but the financiers who bankroll them? Are they lonely? Are they feeling any lack of thedish association? Are they concerned on a personal level with any of us down here on the ground? To ask the question is to answer it. And it’s not as though people don’t notice: progressives complain about inequality, conservatives about moral decline and liberal elitism, reactionaries about the loss of deep tradition and the vulgarization of power, libertarians about the bureaucratic stifling of human action, populists about the abandonment of the common people by their leaders. All these groups are getting something right—aren’t they? When diverse political factions, who don’t agree on much and don’t particularly like one another, are all saying that—to put it simply—something is wrong, the obvious inference is that something is indeed wrong.
The invasion of the Third World—the very term ‘developing world’ implies that these peoples ought to ‘develop’ to the Western level of loneliness and lack of will—by Western businesses and armies, and the importation of its peoples into the West, are homogenizing forces. The word ‘diversity’ is shouted from every available megaphone, but human heterogeneity is being destroyed. We’re told that mass immigration into the West, for example, is enriching—and indeed it is: it enriches those who already have enormous wealth. It allows them to have a broader, cheaper pool of human capital to work for them, vote for their candidates, and replace the native working class, who demand too much dignity (and too much money) for elite tastes. It impoverishes everyone else in the West, of course, but what do they matter? Some White worker in Southern France or North Texas, struggling to feed his family with a service job because the factories have moved elsewhere? Why doesn’t he just draw some welfare from the State and shut his racist mouth? And ‘feminism’ is about empowering women, right? Empowering them to reject the two roles that only a woman can play, and without which society does not exist—to be a wife and a mother—and forcing them into the same class system, the same socioeconomic status games, that men have had to deal with.
Thus we see the ruse of ‘anti-racism’, ‘feminism’, and so on—they are not about the uplift of non-Westerners or women or any other ‘protected class’. They are a means for powerful men to gain even more power. These men do not need to declare themselves a ‘protected class’, of course—their money protects them well enough. Upper-middle-class progressivism does not threaten upper-class neoliberalism; Occupy Wall Street did not hurt Wall Street. The politically powerful Left isn’t going to rise up and smash the banks and the politically powerful Right often acts simply to slow down the Left in their social reforms (and to promote neoliberalism a bit more loudly when the Left starts to yell too much about opposing the capitalism that has them in its back pocket). So what’s to be done?
Culturally and economically insulate yourself from the ‘progress’ around you. It’s time for thedening—fostering a renewed sense of thedishness, of association, of solidarity—in the West and beyond. None of us can do this alone—a thede, by definition, includes more than one person. Westerners have to rekindle, and rebuild, their native identities, and people in every nation have an interest in resisting the homogenization, the commodification, the dethedening, of the Earth. We at Theden come out of a Western heritage, so our focus is on—as the header bar of your browser will tell you—thedening the West, with special attention given to America for two reasons: first, that America is where the globally dominant progressive and neoliberal structures are seated; and second, that most of our staff are Americans. But we do not consider our fellows in other countries as anything less than extended family, and even beyond the West we encourage the revitalization of local cultures.
You will note that on our first day, Theden published a dozen articles—now our ratio has almost reversed, with a dozen days sometimes passing between articles. What’s happened? Simply put, we’ve been busy—working on other projects which have the same goal Theden has. But we can’t neglect the role Theden has to play any longer. We’re here for the long haul, and a long one it’ll be. We need more input. We want to hear from you, our readers, about your struggle, your concerns, your efforts to theden. What are you doing to build a family, a community, a deep thede; to reconnect with your roots; to grow something new from them? What, if anything, is holding you back from doing so? We want to hear from you, and we wish you the best. Godspeed, all of you.
from Why Theden: Looking Forward
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